The 650,000 gun toting Borderlands game has seen major changes this year, and still has a lot left to share before it's September release. After changing the entire art style earlier this year, the game has made leaps and bounds to bring a hands on experience to the table, and we're going to share a bit of that with you now thanks to IGN's pre-E3 preview.
"IGN: This is a game built for co-op. But a lot of people who buy Borderlands will end up playing the single-player mode. How do the two experiences differ?
Randy Pitchford: The single player experience and the cooperative experience are very similar, except that with cooperative play friends can work together to fight and win. Single player and cooperative play mingle seamlessly and your character is totally persistent, so you can get some way through and invite a friend or you can join a friend and bring everything you've earned along with you. It's amazing technology and there isn't a single other game on the consoles that offers the kind of persistent character development in cooperative gaming that Borderlands does."
Built around a co-op model, while still having the option to advance on your own and bring your additional talents (see: guns) to the table, our interest is more than piqued. Additionally, co-op has its own incentive for playing with a buddy, aside from the usual friendships, bonding, and awesome good time!
"IGN: What are some of the co-op skills you can learn and how are they used?
Randy Pitchford: There are a lot of complimentary cooperative skills. The classes themselves complement each other well and within each character, there are ways to get unique and distinctive for particular play styles. I don't want to spoil anything here because a lot of this stuff is really fun to discover."
For those of us still drooling over the staggaring number of guns boasted in the game, IGN asks the big question - just to be sure.
"IGN: Last I remember hearing there was a claim that Borderlands features more than 650,000 unique weapons. Are you sticking to that statement? And if so, how is that even remotely possible?
Randy Pitchford: Actually, 650,000 guns is the safe number. We've now got some other new types of weapon classes and a lot of different weapon manufacturers and we have created a bunch of super rare and unique epic weapons and other gear, so the actual number of different weapons in the game is quite a bit higher than that. There are more weapons in Borderlands than in every shooter on both the 360 and PS3 added together. It's an absurd number of guns to the point where talking about it isn't really relevant any more. What's relevant is to realize that you'll be able to find lots of varied and better weapons and gear as you play to become more and more powerful.
How is it possible that we've created so many guns? We've created technology, as sort of AI for all of the different weapon's manufacturers that we've created, that uses all kinds of different raw materials and components and parts and other content to procedurally generate the weapons for us within the styles of each manufacturer and the nature and general specifications of each class of weapon. It's amazing stuff. I'm still being surprised by it!"
There are a lot more details in the preview, and we didn't want to steal all of that thunder. Bottom line with Borderlands: Prepare to be completely blown away by the massive scale of everything from weapons, to vehicles, to the wide open world!
Thanks to MrxknownJG for the tip!
Source: Xbox360.ign.com